Tips Archives - Epic Presence

The 3 Groups We Talk About When We Say ‘Audience’

October 29, 2019/0 Comments/in Resources, Tips /by Epic Presence Team

In a previous post, I talked about why it’s important for businesses to publish 101-level, kinda-obvious content because that’s exactly the type of information their audiences need.

But that advice begs a follow-up question: Who are these audience members you’re trying to engage with all this content? Aren’t you just trying to talk to potential buyers?

Not always. Broadly speaking, there are three big audiences that a company speaks to:

The people they sell to.
The people who cheer for (and sometimes cheer against) the company.
The people who can create mutually beneficial partnerships.

Let’s break these down a little because each of these audiences require different messages and often their own channels if they are to be engaged.

Customers (Both Current and Potential)

A lot of marketing energy goes toward speaking to the customer audience, and for good reason: That’s where most leads and repeat business come from.

I’m grouping existing customers and potential customers into the same category because they’re just in different stages of the buyer’s journey. Each stage of that journey requires its own messaging, but the goal — conversions — remains the same for everyone you target.

The people who make the customer-support platform Groove understand this very well. Groove’s blog has a bunch of great tutorials on providing top-notch customer support. One good recent example is the exhaustive “How to Deal With Angry Customers” guide.

This kind of content is useful for young companies beginning to think about implementing this kind of software. Those companies are at the awareness stage of the buyer’s journey, and they need some 101-level guides.

Groove’s guides are useful also for existing customers. The people who bought Groove’s software will need ongoing support and internal training for new support-team hires. Groove is positioning itself to those customers as a go-to resource because doing so strengthens those relationships and keeps those customers (and their recurring revenue) in the fold.

For this audience, the focus should be on creating in-depth, practical content that helps them do their jobs better.

The People Who Cheer for You

This is a more nebulous audience than the one above. If you’re lucky, there are lots of people cheering for your company:

Your friends at your co-working space.
Your followers on ProductHunt and Twitter.
Your parents.

Speaking to your supporters is ultimately an act of branding. You are reinforcing what your company stands for and why your supporters care.

Once upon a time, there were companies that published long-form content to support those branding goals. OKCupid famously had a very wonky series on how to optimize your dating profile that was based on user data. More recently, companies like Tesla got into the business of “brand storytelling” because they realized they had these huge audiences of non-customers who simply thought that the brand, the product and/or the founders were cool.

The ROI on that kind of storytelling must not have been very good, though. OKCupid has since stopped analyzing user data on its blog, and Tesla’s blog is pretty dry these days.

So, how do you reach non-customer fans? Social media tend to be the best channel for serving this audience. Low-investment content like behind-the-scenes videos or interviews with team members work really well.

What’s more, this type of content speaks to an important segment of this audience: The people who would enthusiastically apply to work for you. Potential applicants definitely want to hear what your company stands for. Several B2B companies — including Boston Consulting Group, Zapier and McKinsey — have found that Instagram is a useful channel for getting that message out.

For everyone in this audience, it’s important to showcase the ethos your company tries to embody with candid peeks behind the curtain. Authenticity will be rewarded; slick production probably won’t be.

Potential Partners

Finally, there are non-customers whose professional lives are impacted by your company.

It helps to imagine a brick-and-mortar business first to see how these relationships function. Take a healthcare practice with a handful of locations in central Florida, for example. Nearby lunch cafes might want to see that business thrive because the nurses, doctors and admin staff all reliably come in for lunch several times per week.

Now, imagine that healthcare practice’s blog. A local businesses roundup could do pretty well on that blog. That piece could spotlight 10 of the best healthy lunch cafes in the area. When the post goes live, the practice’s team could reach out to the managers of those 10 cafes and let them know their businesses had just been featured.

This is simple, old-fashioned business networking. It’s a good way to create relationships that lead to mutual referrals in real life, and it’s a good way to earn backlinks to support the practice’s web presence.

That same model works for digital companies, too, especially in industries where channel partnerships drive revenue. That’s why Salesforce has a special Medium blog just for channel partners.

For this audience, look for opportunities to support adjacent businesses. Podcasting is a great medium for this. Podcasts let you have in-depth conversations with supply chain partners, channel partners and any other company you share a platform with. The more networking you can do with this audience, the more referral business you can build.

Images by: Davide Ragusa, Nicole Honeywill

Couldn’t You Just Hire a Writer Instead of Paying a Content Marketing Agency?

October 22, 2019/0 Comments/in Tips /by Epic Presence Team

When we are discussing new projects with potential clients, we often get asked, “Why shouldn’t I just hire a writer to do this?” Granted, our fees can roughly equate to a staff writer’s monthly salary, but this is an apples-to-oranges comparison.

Hiring a new staff writer is completely different from hiring an agency because with an agency you get an entire team of people with very specialized skills.

In this article, we will explore why one person is unlikely to pull off the content campaign of your dreams. Then, with as little bias as we can, we will compare the work of building an internal content team vs. hiring an agency.

One Person Can’t Execute an Entire Content Campaign Alone

If your budget allows you to hire three or four people, then there may be some advantages to bringing all of your content marketing in-house. If you choose that route, we encourage you to go into it with your eyes wide open.

Consider the work that goes into a single piece of content:

Strategy. There must be a larger strategy that informs the angle each piece takes. More on that in a moment.
Research. Any blog post worth reading requires at least three hours of good research.
Writing. Most writers will need to carve out blocks of hours for the focused work of writing.
Editing. Someone with subject-matter understanding needs to put their eyes on the copy. Ideally, that person would also understand things like adherence to style guidelines, rhythm, flow, grammar and all the other basics of copy editing. If not, the piece needs a third pair of eyes.
Promotion. For our content, two dozen emails might get sent out to influencers. Someone has to manage those response threads and take any number of actions. That work could include coordinating future content partnerships, making corrections to the published copy or vetting responses for their lead potential. For some of our clients, there’s a followup round of social media promotion.

Now, think about everyone you know. Think about the people on your team. Think about all of the people you’ve interviewed but not hired. Those you’ve met at networking events. How many could own — actually succeed at — each one of these tasks?

Before you commit to an answer, let’s return to the lingering question of strategy.

Content Strategies Are Collaborative

A good content agency will have executed hundreds of campaigns, and their strategies evolve as they test out ideas, analyze results, make changes and iterate. We outlined our strategy process in this post, but here’s the quick and dirty version:

We establish the throughline that connects a client’s mission, their business model and their audience.
We map out that audience’s needs, the publications they read and the influencers they trust.
We pitch topics and generate an entire editorial calendar that, topic by topic, speaks to all the nuanced concerns an audience could have.

It takes a team to brainstorm a coherent strategy. This reason, above all, is why a single writer cannot successfully execute a content campaign by themselves.

Benji Hyam, cofounder of Grow and Convert, makes a similar point on his company’s blog: “I’d say hiring an in-house writer or team of in-house writers is a good option if you’re a larger company and can afford to pay someone or multiple people full-time to do mostly writing. It also might be a good option if you need one person with deep industry expertise to constantly write about one space.

“However, for most businesses, hiring one person in-house with the intention of having them write content, manage a content calendar, distribute content, etc. is not a good idea.”

Vetting and Hiring a Good Writer Takes a Lot of Time

Here’s a number that’s remained pretty consistent in our five-plus years as a company: It takes about 300 applications for us to find one or two writers we want to work with.

That means we have to read 300 emails, 300 resumes and 300 sets of clips before we identify a couple of people who demonstrate the experience, curiosity and skill we need to publish thoughtful longform content.

Then, we hire a handful of writers for several rounds of test projects. (Note: Those have to be paid test projects. You won’t recruit any good writers by handing out unpaid assignments.) A good baseline we’ve found: Pay at least three different writers to take on three projects. In order to vet these writers effectively, we have found that we need to give them the same three test projects. This costs thousands of dollars and delivers a surprisingly small amount of useful copy.

All in all, the time between a candidate’s initial application and their first round of regular assignments is at least a month or more. During those weeks, in addition to the time and costs outlined above, our leadership team spends many hours reviewing, editing and training these candidates. You can expect the same for your company if you want to hire an in-house writer or a freelancer.

Keep in mind this is for the writing work only. The strategy, content promotion and other necessary components of a healthy, profitable campaign will require different personalities and skill sets, all of which get separate hiring processes.

Content Promotion Requires a Different Mindset Than Writing

The best writers tend to be introverted. The best promoters tend to be extroverted. Asking someone who is good at one to do the other is a recipe for disaster.

For someone who isn’t a natural promoter and networker, it can be deceptively difficult to learn content promotion. There is no shortage of blog posts, videos and various other tutorials about promoting content. The problem, however, is this world evolves quickly. Once you’re reading someone’s how-to guide on content promotion, that tactic’s effectiveness has already expired.

Trying to train an in-house writer to handle content promotion is futile. You need to hire for that skill. To do so, you need to look for someone who has lots of experience. They will know what methods of promotion no longer work, and which do.

Remember, too, that any content promoter is only as good as the networks they are plugged into, both online and offline. If your content outreach candidate cannot clearly describe how they keep up with trends, you should probably keep looking.

All of this is to say that a good content promoter — someone who is connected, energetic and inspired — is incredibly hard to find.

Internal Teams Cannot Scale a Campaign at a Moment’s Notice

Let’s say your company has been the exception to the rules above.

You have a killer writer who knows your audience and creates content that consistently resonates with them. Your head of marketing puts eyes on all the copy before it goes live, so posts are going up clean. And there’s still enough time during the week for promo emails, tweets and LinkedIn updates.

Things are going great, in fact. Your blog’s traffic is seeing month-on-month growth, people are engaging with your promotional tactics, and your content funnel is generating leads.

That’s when you run into one of the iron-clad laws of marketing: When something works, do more of it.

So, how do you scale your content efforts? Your awesome writer is at capacity, and your head of marketing doesn’t have the time to read additional drafts.

Hiring one or two new writers is an option. Of course, that means someone has to vet hundreds of applications and test out writers. In the very best case scenario, you’re a month away from being able to double your output.

It takes a team to actually scale at a rate that will keep pace with the growth of your marketing successes. That team must include writers, editors, content promoters and strategists.

“With a boutique content marketing agency, you get an account manager that puts together the content strategy, and a team of expert writers who deliver on it, well, expertly,” writes Daniel Tay, cofounder of the Singapore agency With Content. “Equally, as your content marketing efforts begin to grow, they should also be able to tap into their resources and produce more content for you readily.”

With a team, you don’t need to wait 30 days to double your content output. You can quadruple that output from tomorrow if you need to.

Questions?

If you don’t have the budget to hire an in-house team, and even hiring an agency is a stretch financially, then it may not be the right time for you to invest in content marketing. In most industries, the competition is already too steep for semi-committed content marketing to work. Perhaps it would be better to spend marketing dollars elsewhere.

If you’re stuck, we’d be happy to discuss this with you. Exploring what an agency can do for your content marketing can be a revelatory conversation that shines a light on some fundamental need your company has.

Please send any questions you might have to us via our contact form. Seriously — we love the chance to help someone get their marketing on track, whether that’s via collaboration with us or through some other means.

Images by: Joe Gardner, Headway, Bonneval Sebastien

Audience First: Engaging Content Must Be Empathic Above All Else

October 8, 2019/0 Comments/in Tips /by Eric Barrier

Letting go is sometimes the hardest part of content marketing.

If you’ve ever founded a company, been a CMO or helped build a brand, you know the feeling. You’ve devoted so much time, energy and creativity to animating the brand you’re bringing to market. You’ve outlined the values your company represents, you’ve created a founding narrative that connects with people, you’ve made an unassailable case for how your product is going to revolutionize the lives of its users.

You’re seeing the big picture as clearly as anyone possibly can.

Then, some content marketer comes along and says: “Let’s do a series on industry trends. This will help contextualize your product for potential users and introduce it to a much wider audience.”

The pitch lands with a dull thud. It’s one of the most mundane things you’ve ever heard. “Industry trends?” you think to yourself. “Can’t they see what we’re building here?”

There is a disconnect, but it’s not a misunderstanding about what you’re building or an underestimation of your passion. Rather, the disconnect comes from the fact that content marketers owe a primary duty to your audience, the people who would buy from, cheer for or otherwise be interested in your company.

It is important to honor a founder’s passion for their business — and for us to channel that energy into the content we write — but ultimately content marketers are hired to serve a brand’s audience. Once your company sets down the path of growth and user acquisition, your brand must yield to the practical, everyday needs of your audience.

Don’t worry. All that careful brand-building will bear fruit at a later point in your audience relationships. For now, though, you need to have conversations about the things they care about on their terms. That’s what I mean by “letting go.”

Content Has Two Very Narrow Goals

Content either informs or entertains people. In B2B verticals, the goal should be to arm people with knowledge that will help them do their jobs better and achieve their ambitions. That’s it.

This rule applies whether you’re targeting Jeff Bezos, lifestyle entrepreneurs or entry-level specialists at Deloitte. People in a B2B audience have a bunch of work stuff they need to get done, and they only want to hear from companies that can help them with that list of responsibilities.

So, show them how to get their work done more quickly. Show them how to impress their bosses. Show them how to land more paying clients.

If you’ve built a product that can do any of these things, then you can speak to these goals from a position of authority. Do that often and do it well, and you can earn the trust of your audience. Earn their trust, and you can start to tell brand stories.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. At this stage, your brand is merely a promise that you know how to help someone achieve their goals at work. That promise is why they’re reading your content. They’re not ready to cheer your Series B round or watch your behind-the-scenes Instagram Stories yet. Their practical needs are still driving your relationship with them.

An Engaging Content Campaign Puts Your Business in Context

The content marketer’s job is to understand what those needs are and to find compelling, helpful ways to speak to those needs. That’s why we like to talk about things like contextualizing your product within a broader set of industry trends. We need to baby-step potential customers up to the big picture you’re seeing.

Internally, our team talks about “onboarding,” and as overused as that metaphor is, it’s pretty apt here. We ourselves have to get on board with a client’s mission before we can walk audiences up to that big picture. This requires research, and lots of it.

Here’s the skeleton outline of our onboarding process:

Discovery. We talk to the client about their company’s mission, their business model and whom they intend to sell to. The mission and the business model inform our approach somewhat, but mostly we focus on what kind of customers the company wants to reach.
Mapping. We explore the world in which an audience’s needs live. This includes what their jobs are, what challenges they face, what companies are already speaking to them, what publications these people are reading, what people have influence in that space and what competitors are doing to get their attention.
Keyword research. We look at the keywords the client wants to compete for, what other keywords are available and what opportunities we can seize to drive organic traffic.
Topic generation. The research goes to our team, and we spend several hours researching and pitching topics that speak to the audience’s needs. Keywords might factor into this process, but our team mostly focuses on entering into conversations where there are plenty of influencers we can connect and network with.
Content strategy. Finally, we curate this list of topics, identify some of the best influencers, and sketch out some themes that we can speak to week after week. We then present this information to the client as the framework for an editorial calendar.

By the time we actually start writing, then, we will have mapped out the relevant universe for a client’s audience. We will know what issues they care about, which of those issues dovetail with the client’s product or services, and what influencers we need to connect with to get content distributed to the farthest reaches of the audience’s universe.

It’s within this context that we try to create helpful and engaging content.

What a Strategic Content Campaign Looks Like

Plenty of companies are finding ways to turn their brands’ promises into helpful content. Below are a couple of examples of companies understand the value their products create, and they translate that value into tactical advice that resonates with their target audience.

Full disclosure: These examples came from me opening Product Hunt, selecting a “Best of 2018” list and clicking through the websites of the B2B products. Not deeply scientific, but my methodology did provide a nice snapshot of how scattershot startup marketing can be, even in B2B verticals.

Slab

Slab is a platform for creating robust internal documents. CEO Jason Chen calls this “building your team’s long-term memory.”

Companies use Slab to create employee manuals, internal onboarding documents, style guides and any other repositories of information that team members would need access to. Users can edit the documents in real time, and there are tons of integrations for speedy workflows.

Who would want a product like this? Executives at growing companies whose needs for internal documentation have outgrown what Google Docs can handle.

In recent months, Slab has begun to address that audience with a series of blog posts about CEOs, their styles of communications and how they build internal cultures. This piece about Intel cofounder and former CEO Andy Grove is a great example from that series.

With this strategy, Slab is trying to lead conversations about how CEOs can guide their companies through early phases of maturity. Those phases coincide pretty nicely with when an organization would start investing in software like Slab, so the strategy is solid.

Notice, though, that the blog post doesn’t contain overt marketing messages about the product. The content simply seeks to provide executives with a role model for fostering company cultures.

Older blog posts mostly seemed to cover company news and product updates — useful, but not content that speaks to Slab’s audience. This CEO Writing series indicates to me that the company has turned an important corner with its content, and Slab’s marketing team should consider doing weekly content that speaks to this executive-level audience.

Atrium

Atrium is essentially a law firm with a SaaS aesthetic. The company provides legal help to startups, and machine learning is used to inform that advice, so the company must be designed for scale.

As with Slab above, the natural audience for Atrium’s content would be founders and executives, though for companies at an earlier stage of growth. That means Atrium’s content needs to speak to the challenges, legal or otherwise, inherent at these early stages of a startup’s growth.

Atrium’s team does this well, too. It’s clear the company invests heavily in content. Case in point: The company invites big-name CEOs into the office for fireside chats. Reddit cofounder and CEO Steve Huffman recently stopped by to talk fundraising, and the content team summarized the event in a blog post.

Further, the company’s executives are publishing their own thoughts about early-growth issues such as bridging the gaps between sales and legal teams and dealing with the emotional challenges of being a startup founder.

Again, no explicit sales pitches or marketing messages. The content is merely seeking the attention of startup founders. From there, the content funnel can offer further advice, nurture audience relationships and shepherd the most engaged members of that audience toward lead qualification.

Your Brand’s Role in a Strategic, Engaging Content Campaign

Notice how Slab and Atrium stick to their brand messages, even when they’re telling the stories of CEOs at other companies.

Slab’s brand is a little heady and cognitive. This gives the company room to talk about things like Stoic philosophies, which ostensibly have nothing to do with creating internal documents — but everything to do with being the kind of leader who thinks about internal knowledge management.

Or take Atrium’s promise of being a better law firm. Talking to Steve Huffman about fundraising has nothing to do with legal advice — but everything to do with tearing down the stodgy, stuffed-shirt connotations that we associate with the words “law firm.”

That’s how the relationship between your brand and your content works. Your brand makes a promise about what your company is and what your people stand for. Your content creates little opportunities to make good on that promise — even when doing so appears tangential to goals like user acquisition or revenue growth.

Companies that embrace this brand-content dynamic position themselves to reach more relevant audiences and earn those audiences’ trust.

Images by: Kelly Sikkema, Austin Distel, Jose Aljovin

What We Mean When We Talk About Influencers

June 25, 2019/7 Comments/in Experts, Tips /by Eric Barrier

Influencer marketing has already made itself the butt of too many jokes. When a so-called influencer makes news today, it’s usually for the sake of public derision, whether it’s someone pretending to attend Coachella or being shooed off a stoop in West London.

The problem here isn’t influencer marketing itself. It’s always useful to have a well-known person publicly vouch for you or your brand.

The problem is many people don’t understand what influence actually is. One hundred thousand Instagram followers don’t necessarily comprise an influential audience. Five thousand LinkedIn followers, however, might.

When brands mistake one for the other, they end up spending time and resources chasing a relationship that’s ultimately worthless for their marketing goals.

The Basics of Influencer Marketing

Influencer marketing is nothing more than finding ways to have a trusted person promote your brand, your product or your content.

We call those trusted people influencers because they already have audiences who turn to them for advice. If you were marketing an initiative to promote healthier lunches in schools, for example, a word of support from Michelle Obama would be quite influential in that initiative’s success.

There are two ways you can get influencers to promote you:

By paying them.
By finding common cause with their own missions.

People who agree with you are much more willing to promote you for free. It takes time to establish and nurture those connections, however. So, you’re effectively making a choice between spending money or spending time when building influencer relationships.

What you’re promoting largely informs which direction you choose. If you’re promoting a consumer product, you would approach influencers differently than if you were promoting an article. People pay good money to Instagram influencers to get a single product placement on those channels.

We market content, which follows very different rules than product marketing or brand marketing. Content doesn’t need to tell a product story or a brand story. It can exist independently of those narratives.

Someone can find common cause with a piece of content without having that feel like an endorsement of a company’s products or brands. You can like a Budweiser Super Bowl ad without liking the company’s beer, for example.

Content marketing allows brands to make these kinds of connections at scale.

Why Would Influencers Promote Content for Free?

A piece of longform content might contain dozens of novel or noteworthy ideas, any of which can resonate with the right influencers. And if someone can find common cause with one of those ideas, they will be far more likely to share your content — to retweet it, to link to it, to include it in their newsletters.

If we write something that casts a specific company in a positive light, it’s pretty easy to get that company’s CMO to share our content. If we write something that makes a consultant appear especially knowledgeable about a topic, it’s pretty easy to get that consultant to share our content.

And they’ll do it for free.

The key to all of this, however, is understanding how to recognize and foster those alliances with potential influencers. That’s why we’ve built influencer curation into the foundation of our content-creation process. We don’t write a word of copy without first understanding who might be able to promote that piece of content, and what their potential motivations for doing so are.

Identifying Relevant, Motivated Influencers

“You don’t need a Kardashian to pitch your product,” says Barrett Wissman, principal and co-chairman of IMG Artists. “While influencers with big audiences make big impressions, those impressions don’t always last.”

Wissman’s point holds true for B2C markets as well as B2B markets. In both cases, someone capable of elevating a marketing message is someone whose influence can leave a lasting impression.

In our five-plus years of influencer marketing, we have found that the best influencers share a common set of traits:

Audience overlap. An influencer’s audience must be interested in the same things as your own audience. This seems obvious, but we’ve seen many brands lose sight of this rule in pursuit of bigger, shinier influencer relationships.
Audience engagement. An influencer needs to regularly interact with their audience. If they just broadcast messages or link-dump content to their followers, then it’s likely that no one is actually paying attention to them. We look for people who converse with their audiences. When doing influencer research, make sure to look for a few likes and shares on their social timelines. This behavior is probably a better qualifier than the number of followers.
Skin in the game. The best influencers are the ones who are still growing their audiences. They will have an incentive to work with brands, even smaller brands, if that means they can reach new audiences.
Credibility. This is the most subjective trait, and there are plenty of people online who are experts at faking their own credibility. Eventually, good content marketers develop a sixth sense for discerning authentic domain experts from the charlatans hoping to fake it ‘til they make it.

Introducing Those Influencers to Your Audience

There are two ways to get an influencer’s thoughts into your own content: Ask for an exclusive quote, or cite something they’ve said on the record elsewhere.

Citing on-the-record statements is the scalable option. After all, dozens — sometimes 100-plus — influencers get vetted according to the rubric above every time we write a piece of content. That translates to between 10 and 25 influencers mentioned in a published piece of content.

Exclusive quotes are valuable, but they take time to source. That’s why reporters spend years working their beats and building source relationships. (More on that in a moment.)

For now, understand that quoting influencers in longform writing is an excellent way to make your content inherently promotable, and a great first step in building long-term influencer relationships.

Getting an Influencer’s Attention

We’ve found that the best way to reach a busy influencer is to offer them something of value up front. In most cases, the thing we can offer is a platform. When we quote an HR consultant in a piece on the challenges of recruitment, we get that person’s ideas in front of a relevant audience.

When the piece goes live, we send out a quick email that essentially says, “We featured you in a recent article.” If the influencer is actively trying to grow their own audience, this will be a valuable introduction for them.

And if we have vetted our influencers properly, those emails will go to people who have overlapping audiences and skin in the game. They will be glad to hear from us and will be likely to respond. (According to our historical data, about one in four influencers respond to that email.)

Once you have made that initial connection, offered something of value and received a positive response, then you can begin to nurture that influencer relationship.

What an Influencer Relationship Looks Like: 3 Examples

Influencer relationships are a lot like customer relationships: They’re all at various levels of awareness and engagement. As such, an influencer relationship might be able to impact your campaign directly and immediately, or the relationship might be an asset worth nurturing over time.

Below are three recent examples of brand-influencer relationships we’ve seen that demonstrate what an influencer can do for a campaign:

Content Promotion

At the end of February, a client published a piece we wrote on the importance of good customer service. In that piece, we cited Shep Hyken, who has written several books and consulted several companies on how to build stronger customer relationships.

Hyken shared the piece with his Twitter audience of 116,000-plus followers, which gave the post’s share counts a nice boost. More importantly, it opened the door for us to ask Hyken for an exclusive quote the next time we write about customer service. When we publish that exclusive quote, it’s a good bet that Hyken will promote that article.

Active Content Collaboration

In 2018, SAP SuccessFactors published an eBook on employee wellness that was built around exclusive quotes from some of the biggest influencers in HR. These included Sharlyn Lauby of HR Bartender and Josh Bersin of Deloitte. According to Lee Odden at TopRank, influencer shares “represented 86% of all ebook views and 69% of the conversions.”

Even for brands as established as SAP, having industry influencers distribute content on your behalf can drive conversions and introduce you to new audiences.

Industry Networking

Sometimes, an influencer relationship is valuable because it puts your brand in front of some of the smartest people in your industry. These are the people who can potentially open numerous doors for you.

Case in point: In early 2018, a client published a piece we wrote on micromanagement and the insecurities of leadership, a piece that featured a TEDx talk by Ohio State University researcher Tanya Menon.

When we reached out to let her know we’d featured her talk, her first response was enthusiastic and gracious. Later that morning she followed up to let us know that her talk was being featured that day on the main TED page. She was excited, and she was happy to share that excitement with us — and to offer her availability for future collaboration.

Our chat with Menon during the outreach highlighted just how big a role serendipity plays in networking and influencer marketing.

Recognizing and Wielding Real Influence

So, who has more influence, the person with an Instagram following of 100K, or the person with a LinkedIn following of 5,000?

The answer, as always, is “it depends.”

If you have a consumer product you’re trying to market, the Instagrammer might be your best bet. Be ready to pay for each product placement.

If you have a software company you’re trying to position as an industry authority, however, the person on LinkedIn will be more likely to influence your audience. And with the strategy outlined above, you have all the tools you need to build and nurture a relationship with that influencer.

Images by: Rémi Walle, Austin Distel, Timi David Fregene

How Strategic Brand Partnerships Can Boost Your Content Marketing

May 23, 2019/0 Comments/in Tips /by Epic Presence Team

Your offerings are outstanding, your marketing strategy is sound and your content is part of the conversation — yet your numbers don’t reflect the kind of deal-closing relationship you want to have with your customer base.

If this sounds familiar, it might be time to consider teaming up and using brand partnerships to boost your content marketing.

Just as an introduction from a trusted common friend can help you be more trusted by a new acquaintance, introducing your brand through shared content with another brand can help that audience trust you more. “It’s been shown that average people (like you and me) trust influencers’ opinions nearly as much as our friends’ and families’ opinions,” Chris Ake writes at Forbes.

Here, we look at how strategic brand partnerships are built and how to use yours to improve the quality and reach of your content.

What Can Brand Partnerships Do For Your Business?

In a strategic brand partnership, two or more companies work together to create value — and to spread the word of that enhanced value to every participants’ target audience, as Gregory Pollack notes at MarketingProfs.

“For a true strategic partnership brand marketing program to work, both brands must complement each other and deliver similar customer profiles,” Pollack writes. “Even more importantly, the partnership must sit within the lifestyle and user experience of the customer.”

Partnership brand marketing isn’t a new idea. As Christian Daugstrup at thunder::tech points out, one of the best-known examples of a brand partnership is the cereal box with a branded toy inside. The combination boosts sales of both the cereal and the toy, making both companies happier.

In the digital era, marketing partnerships look a bit different. Not only are the products or services often less tangible than a box of cereal and a toy, but companies are no longer limited to partnering to distribute the product or service itself. They can partner to distribute content, too.

Brand Partnerships for Content Marketing: Key Considerations

Today, many consumers are already loyal to the brands they love, and the anonymizing influence of social media — where consumers can curate the content they see — can make it tough to break into new markets.

This tough field is where content marketing partnerships shine. Natalie Staines, director of marketing at r2i, recommended using brand partnerships to generate leads. “When one target audience is totally saturated, leveraging another brand, and the peer influence of its followers, is an almost necessary means to an end,” Staines says. Partnering with the right brand can help your company reach an audience that thinks it’s not interested in new content — until it sees what you have to offer.

To identify promising potential partners:

Look for a non-competitor. At a minimum, your partner shouldn’t directly compete with your product or service. “Better yet, they compliment you,” says Braveen Kumar at Shopify.
Pay attention to the audience. Different customer groups respond differently to different forms of social media, content and accessing options. For instance, Chris Wilson at GMA notes that age is a huge determiner of the success of a digitally based loyalty program. Make sure your partner is targeting the same demographics you are in ways that work for that audience.
Know your own needs. “Before getting to the tactics on a content partnership, it is important to understand the business need that is driving the partnership,” Demand Media’s Felicia Alexander tells Scribble Live. “Are you looking to attract a new audience, increase time on site, drive new sales?” Seek partners who can help you meet your needs just as you help the partner meet theirs.

For many companies, the dream partner is a brand that meets their every criteria for an ideal partnership — and who feels entirely out of their league. Too often, the result is a partnership that can never succeed because it is never made.

“I think some people are afraid to ask for help from other content creators,” says Jess Ostroff, managing editor at Convince & Convert. “They see it as invasive, pushy, or they’re not confident enough in their own content to be willing to share it.”

To solve this problem, Ryan Kettler at BootSuite recommends doing three things:

Read the blog posts and comments at potential partners’ sites to understand their audience and whether you can contribute to the conversation with that audience.
Stock your own content channels with quality information that adds to the conversation.
Offer valuable content with a creative twist or voice that’s all your own.

Once you find the right partner, Kettler recommends being thoughtful, reliable and promotional. Collaborate for results that help both partners, keep your promises and promote your collaborative content as thoroughly as you would your own.

Above all, be authentic. “I try to be as natural as I can on first-time calls,” says HubSpot’s Christine White. “This gives the potential partner a sense of my personality … it loosens the vibe and allows for a more relaxed conversation, which means you can really get to know each other and your goals.”

Case Studies: Outstanding Content Marketing Partnerships

Another way to ensure you’re building a solid strategy for a branded content marketing partnership is to analyze the success of other online brand partnerships. Here are some examples of content marketing partnerships done well.

1. National Geographic and Tourism New Zealand

National Geographic and Tourism New Zealand teamed up to provide “The Ultimate New Zealand Experience,” featuring video directed by Bryce Dallas Howard. The combination allows Tourism New Zealand to leverage National Geographic’s reputation for stunning visuals and thoughtful coverage of the natural world and current events, reaching an audience that might not otherwise have thought of New Zealand as a rich cultural getaway.

2. Vox and Spotify

In a partnership that only exists in the digital world, Vox and Spotify teamed up to create “The Secret to Your Discover Playlist? A Cyborg Approach.” Consumers who love Vox’s deep dives into obscure topics are drawn into the details of obscure 1970s synth-funk, while those who love Spotify enjoy learning more about exactly how the app’s Discover Weekly tool works.

3. Visit Seattle and Sundance TV

When you’re already committed to creating audiovisual works with a short film feel, there’s no better place to show them off than to a film-obsessed audience. Enter Visit Seattle’s collaboration with Sundance TV, “Five by Five.” In it, the Visit Seattle spots take on the feel of short documentaries. Each was shot in a single day and emphasizes the storytelling dynamic of film over the selling point of the city in a way that nevertheless makes both points unforgettable.

4. The Wall Street Journal and Chase

Financial mainstays like The Wall Street Journal and Chase would seem, at first, to have everything going for them when it comes to being a household name. Yet the two established a partnership to speak to a younger audience with “Inside the Moment,” a digital visual experience that allows visitors to explore 360-degree views of San Francisco, New Orleans and Miami. Each features deep dives into those cities’ iconic neighborhoods. The result is a lush yet approachable feel that underscores the value of smart finance.

5. Fatherly and Airbnb

Content site Fatherly provides parenting insights and advice; space-sharing company Airbnb wants to encourage travelers to find the perfect destination. The two paired up in “This Photographer Proves a Quick Family Getaway Can Become an Uncharted Adventure,” a photo essay in which Airbnb locations provide the backdrop for a family’s weekend trip up the Oregon coast, discovering that “it’s best to vacation like you live there.”

Takeaways for Marketing Directors

Why do each of these examples stand out? They combine two brands with overlapping audiences and a shared vision — and they do it in a way that not only informs but inspires.

As inspirational content continues to grab the attention of viewers, the best strategy for boosting content may be to seek out brand partnerships that inspire, too.

Images by: rawpixel, Brooke Cagle

How to Create a Distribution Plan to Supplement Your Content Strategy

May 20, 2019/0 Comments/in Resources, Tips /by Epic Presence Team

How old is content marketing?

According to Joe Pulizzi at the Content Marketing Institute, the world’s oldest “blog post” arguably dates back to 4200 BCE, when a cave painting was found that can be read as “6 ways a spear can save you from a wild boar.”

That painting probably offered life-saving information to the boar hunters of the day. Of course, a cave wall has a fraction of the reach today’s digital world does — yet too much content created today ends up in the Web equivalent of a cave because its publishers lack a content distribution plan.

According to Jodi Harris at CMI, 62 percent of the most successful content was backed by a content marketing plan, while only 16 percent of the least successful content had a marketing plan behind it.

“Without a content distribution strategy, even the most creative, innovative, and groundbreaking content may never be discovered,” Dawn Papandrea wrote in a 2016 article for NewsCred. This simple statement of fact is at the heart of the content distribution problem. It is also the reason a content distribution plan is essential.

Map the Territory

Papandrea recommends starting your content distribution planning process by asking the following questions:

Who is your audience?
Why do you want them to see your content?
How do they consume content?

One easy way to find answers to these questions is by building buyer personas, according to Marcia Riefer Johnston at CMI. Buyer personas help you get a sense of your target audience members as people, making it easier to predict the best ways to reach them.

This process can also help you identify previously unexplored channels for creating content. For instance, if your target audience spends a great deal of its time watching tutorials or TED Talks on YouTube, you’ll want to branch into video content, says Heidi Cohen.

Clare McDermott also recommends looking for ways to differentiate content early so that your message stands out. Differentiation is especially important when your product or service has a wide range of potential competitors.

Map Your Offerings

Just what are you distributing?

Content on scattershot topics will likely have a scattershot effect when it’s distributed. At a minimum, keeping track of its widely varying keywords and hashtags will dilute your focus and, ultimately, your brand.

Instead, Natasha Hoke, marketing manager at Upscope, recommends focusing content (both creation and distribution) around “topic clusters.” Topic clusters use a central page linked to several related content items, covering a single topic in depth with a set of closely related keywords, hashtags and similar organizational elements.

Betsy MacLeod at Blue Corona recommends an alternate strategy: Map the content you plan to distribute according to the “See, Think, Do, Care” model. Each work corresponds to a different stage in the buyer’s journey.

By targeting both the content and its distribution to the right stage for your audience, you can reach the right people in the right time at the right way for the results you seek.

Go Where the People Are

Your audience’s profile can help you narrow down the best types of content to develop and the best places to distribute it. But audience profiles won’t answer every question.

For instance: How should you balance paid and unpaid distribution channels?

Paid distribution channels include ad networks, paid social media and native advertising, all of which partner your company with a publisher to provide content for their audience, as Instapage notes.

Paid channels can be a good way to get a foot in the door when starting to distribute content, but it’s best to use money strategically while seeking to grow content in other ways, says Papandrea.

Otherwise, your numbers will drop dramatically every time a paid campaign ends.

Like paying other kids on the playground to be your friend, paying for content distribution can make you feel popular in the short term, but it doesn’t build relationships in the long term.

Fortunately, unpaid distribution options rule the Internet, with options abounding. Social media, genre-specific content platforms like YouTube and SlideShare, crowdsourcing audience participating, focusing on SEO, guest blogging and nurturing leads by distributing content directly to relevant business prospects are all ways to get noticed without spending cash on advertising, notes Stacy Jackson at ClearVoice.

These tactics can be remarkably easy. Consider one of our key distribution strategies: Targeting influencers. These are the people quoted by name in any piece of content. There are 14 such people in this post. When it goes live, we will reach out to them individually to let them know we have featured their thoughts in a piece of content. If they like what we’ve written, they are encouraged to share it. This type of PR-style outreach can be a very effective approach to reach and grow a broader audience.

Further, consider distributing in-house first. James Haslam, content manager at Adjust, started distributing content within the young SaaS company by sending emails to everyone on the team. The result? Ten times more shares, on average, for each created piece. When content is in the hands of your staff, they can use it in highly targeted ways as they work with customers and contacts from day to day.

Social Media Distribution Plan: Why and How

Facebook’s ad page claims that the site hosts 900 million unique visitors each day. According to YouTube’s 2018 statistics, the site has 1.3 billion users, with 30 million visiting each day. Instagram’s blog boasts about its 500 million users, 300 million of whom check Instagram each day.

These major social channels are powerhouse places to distribute content — but what they offer in visibility, they lack in specificity. “The challenge for marketers is to understand how their audiences are viewing content on these platforms, and target them appropriately,” Thomas Barnes at Pixability tells us.

Once marketers find the right niche on the big sites, they “must also carefully monitor their campaigns and adjust throughout the flight toward the targeting parameters and creative assets that are resonating with their target audience,” he says.

It helps to get excited about branching out, too. “You can’t solely rely on Google or Facebook for all your traffic,” Sherry Bonelli writes at Search Engine Land. “You need to get traffic from a variety of sources: paid media, niche channels, online directories, user groups, social communities, forums, social media, and so on.”

Do More With Your Existing Content

Bonelli also recommends refreshing the content you already have. For instance, blog posts can be combined or converted into short ebooks, opening up distribution options and creating lead magnets for mailing lists and other distribution channels. Many blog posts also make great video scripts and infographic outlines.

Entrepreneur Myk Pono notes you can also recycle content without changing its genre. For instance, an article on the top three challenges faced by your customers’ companies in the coming year might contain two or three points that would each make their own article. With a bit of editing, the same article might thrive on multiple text-based channels.

When you do create new content, don’t hesitate to schedule multiple re-shares of the same or similar links, videos or images. “Given the fast-paced nature of our social feeds, hyping up your latest post multiple times is totally fair game,” Brent Barnhart writes at Sprout Social. “Simply switch up your captions, hashtags and imagery to keep from parroting yourself to your followers.”

Images by: rawpixel, Delfi de la Rua, Glenn Carstens-Peters

How to Make Your Content Friendlier to Voice Search (Without Overhauling Your Entire Site)

May 19, 2019/0 Comments/in Tips /by Epic Presence Team

“Siri, find a good Japanese restaurant in Atlanta.”

“Cortana, how do I incorporate photos into a spreadsheet?”

“Alexa, give me a recipe for pancakes.”

“OK Google, can a giraffe breathe and swallow at the same time?”

For years, companies have focused their online content marketing on text-based searches. What do people type when they’re looking for a product or service like ours, they ask, and how do we capture those phrases in a way search engine algorithms notice?

As voice search tools like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and Google’s Voice Assistant have become more convenient and intuitive, however, customers use them more often — and they’ve changed the way they phrase queries to account for the voice-activated nature of the search tool.

Here, we look at how the move from text to voice search is changing our approach to content, and how to make changes that will capture both voice and text searchers.

How Voice Search is Changing Our Approach to Content

Voice-activated search tools are pervading our homes and workplaces. Studies estimate that by 2022, more than half of US households will have a voice-activated speaker device, according to Sarah Perez at TechCrunch.

But the biggest voice device expected to change the way we search is the smartphone. In mid-2016, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that 20 percent of mobile queries were voice-based.

The numbers have grown since, making voice search ever more commonplace and affecting which results rise to the top of those searches.

To complicate matters further for content teams, every device uses a different search engine or combination of search engines from which to draw knowledge, according to Britney Muller at the Content Marketing Institute. For instance, Google Home and Google Voice Assistant both use Google’s data, Siri and Cortana rely on Bing, and Alexa defaults to a combination of Bing and Amazon data.

There’s still no single strategy that will optimize content for every voice device. Focusing content on the way the use of voice changes both the query and the response, however, can help your content rise to the top of voice search results.

Make Keywords Conversational

Text-based searches tend to cut a query down to its most important words. Voice-based searches, by contrast, are structured much more similarly to the way we speak.

“If I were to approach an employee in a pet food store, I wouldn’t typically ask ‘best pet food dog?’” Angus Ewart writes at Small Business BC. Instead, the question would be phrased as “What is the best pet food for my dog?” or “What dog food do you recommend?”

When voice search first debuted, it had a much harder time with recognizing speech and matching it to relevant answers. Voice search’s word error rate was over 20 percent six years ago, but is eight percent or less today, AJ Agarwal writes at Forbes. This means that content marketing teams don’t have to account for misspoken or misinterpreted words anymore — but they do still need to account for the many ways that people might voice a particular question.

Crucial Context That Voice Searches Provide

The good news? Good keyword research has always been about putting a human reader first, says Julia McCoy at the Content Marketing Institute, and good keyword research for voice search optimization is no different.

Optimizing keywords for voice search starts by collecting keywords that surround a target word or phrase. To find the target, consider which questions your customers might ask that would lead them to your company. Don’t skip the question words: Uses of “who,” “what,” “when,” “where,” “why,” and “how” jump dramatically when a query moves from text to speech, says Neil Patel.

Voice search also demands optimization for long-tail keywords, Susannah Noel writes at Clariant Creative. Traditionally, keywords have been short, as the majority of text-based searches are only two to three words long, Purna Virji at Microsoft points out. Voice-based searches, however, are often longer; they’re less likely to be two words and more likely to be longer than four words.

These wordy questions provide valuable context about the searcher’s needs, interests and goals, Ian Kelley writes at Vital. That context is often missing from text-based searches. For that reason, much content aimed at capturing text searchers often skips that context, too.

For instance, Kelley notes, a text search for “best laptops for college students” doesn’t indicate on what basis the searcher wants to determine what’s “best.” Articles and blog posts written to target this phrase may choose their own “bests,” which may not match the customer’s interests.

By contrast, “What are the best-priced laptops for college students?” is a request for comparisons based on cost, which a voice search can more easily provide — and which content marketers can more thoughtfully target.

Don’t Reinvent the Wheel to Accommodate These Searches

Does this mean you need to write new content for every long-tail variation on every question that might bring voice searchers to your website? Not necessarily. Brian Dean at Backlinko analyzed 10,000 voice queries and responses to discover that very few voice results had the exact words of the query in their title tag. “Therefore, creating individual pages for each voice search query doesn’t appear to be an effective voice search SEO strategy,” Dean says.

Instead, adapting existing content to address some of the most common long-tail questions may be more effective than dashing off a new, unoriginal piece of work for every possible combination of words — especially since the average word count on a voice search results page was 2,312 words, according to Amanda Zantal-Wiener at HubSpot.

Turning existing content into value-packed longform content may do far more for voice search results than creating endless streams of new pages.

Get Specific

Fifteen percent of new Google voice searches every day are for combinations of words that haven’t been Googled before, according to Heather Horton at Ecrubox Digital. That’s because the use of spoken language changes the way we phrase queries — and the contexts in which we make them.

A Google case study revealed that most voice search queries share three common elements:

They’re more likely than text queries to be about an action-based, on-the-go topic. Think users looking for store hours or directions to a specific location. In fact, one in three mobile searches are local in nature, according to DialogTech’s Christie Huber.
They’re less likely than text queries to deal with sensitive information.
They don’t include searches for sites or information that require user interaction, like an online catalog.

In addition to understanding what people ask in voice searches (and keywording accordingly), understanding how those questions are asked — on the go, impersonally, with a quick response in mind — can help companies structure their content to provide the response searchers are looking for, says Elizabeth Bush at the Enveritas Group.

When the “how” aspect of questions is understood, the “how” of answers can be improved. Dean’s Backlinko study found that short and simple was the way to go: On average, voice search results were 29 words long and were written at a 9th grade reading level.

Finally, as Tom Salvat notes at Concured, specificity can help companies rise to the top of voice search results — and the top is where companies need to be, since voice-based search engines typically read only the first result aloud to the user.

Prioritize Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are the parts of a result that Google Home and Google Assistant read aloud in response to a voice search query. In addition to reading the information aloud, Google’s tools also typically cite the name of the website that provided the result, making featured snippets a powerful tool for putting your brand in front of potential customers, Bryson Meunier writes at Search Engine Land.

Unsurprisingly, information on how to create solid featured snippets has gotten a great deal more attention in recent months. Tips for creating content that lands in the featured snippet spot from Julia McCoy, again, at the Content Marketing Institute include:

Answer the questions readers are asking. “How does,” “how to” and “what is” queries commonly result in featured snippet responses.
Make your answer short and to the point. Content that doesn’t answer the question won’t get the featured snippet.
Create high-quality longform content. Featured snippets use the same ranking system as the rest of Google, so quality content is a must. Strive to offer the best answer available.

Finally, stay on top of Google’s news on featured snippets. The company published a guide to featured snippets in early 2018, authored by Danny Sullivan, Google’s public liaison for speech. This guide provides excellent insights from the search engine itself.

In addition to targeting Google’s featured snippet option, optimizing short pieces of content for other platforms, like Bing-based Siri and Alexa, is becoming easier. Schema’s “speakable” extension, set for rollout in late 2018, will allow website owners to indicate snippets of text that are particularly suited to being read aloud by voice assistants, giving content creators the ability to indicate to voice systems what they should read to users.

Why It’s Time to Befriend Voice Search in Content Marketing

Voice search use continues to grow as users discover its accessibility and speed mesh well with their needs. Adapting content to incorporate voice considerations can make it more closely match natural speech, read more engagingly and provide clearer, more concise answers — all of which puts that content, and your company, front and center of search results.

Images by: sifotography/©123RF Stock Photo, dragonimages/©123RF Stock Photo, Kaufdex

How to Use Live Video in Your Content Marketing

August 7, 2018/0 Comments/in Tips /by Epic Presence Team

From Facebook Live to Periscope to IGTV, live video streaming has gained major momentum in the last several months — and not just among individuals who enjoy playing with the latest social media craze.

Brands are launching into the live video space, as well, in order to build awareness, converse with customers and share everything they have to offer.

Here, we look at the why and how of live video marketing: Why brands need to embrace it and how to make it work for you.

Why Live Video Is Important Right Now

Video is one of the most-consumed forms of media online today. Marcus Sheridan at Social Media Examiner estimates that by next year 80 percent of what we consume online will be media content. The rise in video content in 2018 suggests that Sheridan’s estimate may be right on track.

Mary Lister at WordStream backs this up with numbers:

More than 1 billion people use YouTube, making it the world’s second-largest search engine behind parent company Google.
45 percent of YouTubers watch more than an hour of video a week.
82 percent of Twitter users watch video content on Twitter, even though it is a primarily text-based platform.

According to TJ McCue at Forbes, live video marketing is poised to account for 13 percent of all video streamed in 2018, and the share of live video will keep rising as the amount of total overall streamed content rises. Meanwhile, 64 percent of customers are more likely to buy an item online once they’ve seen a video about it, says Matt Bowman at Forbes, so brands have plenty of incentive to keep producing video.

Live video is especially good at grabbing the attention of younger viewers: Among Internet users younger than 35, half say they watch live video online, according to Madeline Vuong at the Garrigan Lyman Group.

Video isn’t just popular; it’s preferred. Over half (53 percent) of potential customers want to see more video content from marketers, according to Lindsay Kolowich at HubSpot. Nearly the same percentage (51.9 percent) of marketing professionals say that video has the best ROI of every type of content they use. That means there are supply-side incentives and demand-side incentives for companies to create more video content.

The upswing in ROI awareness may be directly related to the increase in the use of video as a marketing tool. While only 24 percent of companies used video in 2015, today that number has risen to 87 percent, according to Outbrain. And 95 percent of marketers are entering the live video world this year, according to Mike O’Brien at ClickZ.

The other big thing that makes live video so appealing: FOMO.

The fear of missing out is what make live video feel suspenseful, special and appealing, says Krystal Overmyer at Skyword. Combined with our natural human curiosity, it makes live video psychologically appealing to a wide range of customers. We want to know what’s going on, and we feel disappointed if we’re not included.

How to Create a Strategy for Your Live Video Marketing

If you are ready to dive into live video as a content format, follow these four tips below.

1. Choose Content That Aligns With Your Marketing Goals

There are dozens of different forms of content that can be produced via live video, often with effects you won’t get from any other form of content. Single Grain’s Eric Siu recommended several of these, including interactive customer service, product demonstrations, FAQ sessions and even opt-in focus groups.

Where should you place live video in your marketing funnel? According to Luria Petrucci at Livestreaming Pros, the answer is “anywhere.” Tawanna B. Smith at MGT Travel Media agrees — and notes that live video can be a powerful tool for engaging and converting potential customers, since it couples the closeness of real-time human interaction with the fear of missing out.

2. Plan, But Don’t Overproduce

Jay Baer at Convince & Convert recommends having a general plan in mind for your live broadcasts, but not to go overboard. “Brands are afraid of being imperfect,” Baer said, but the real value of live video is in giving audiences a more authentic, real-time version of the companies and brands that interest them.

Sylvain Gauchet, cofounder of Apptamin and App2Video, says “The first thing to do is to plan it. You can’t just plug in your device and start capturing footage” — especially when that footage is being broadcast live.

Instead, Gauchet recommends outlining the scenario for the video, and then using the outline as a general guide. Be willing to deviate from the outline when it’s clear there’s a better story elsewhere. Early video streaming adopter Brian Fanzo told Baer that it’s important to go “where the participants wanted to go” — as Fanzo did in one live session where he changed his discussion on the fly from a backstage tour to answering questions about the Samsung phone he was using to film.

But while video is increasingly in demand, many companies shy away from it due to its production-heavy demand. “Despite the low barrier to producing a video (a smartphone and free editing software), it’s still very difficult to achieve a final product that’s an effective marketing piece,” Dennis Balgavy at Britton says.

3. Know What You Will Do With the Audience You Build

Kimbe MacMaster, formerly manager of content marketing at Vidyard, recommends planning ways to keep track of metrics associated with live videos before you begin streaming. Key metrics McMaster mentions include:

Attendance numbers. How many people were watching?
Conversion from viewers. How many people follow through on the livestream’s call to action?
Attention span. Who dropped out when, and can you determine why?
Post-livestream views. Who tunes in after the fact, when, and how do they find the video?

Other useful metrics may include MQLs generated, employee engagement or influencers who enter your pipeline. MacMaster recommends choosing the metrics that are most relevant to your goals.

4. Before You Broadcast, Promote!

It’s tough for audiences to tune in live if they don’t know when, where or how to do so.

Encourage them to tune in by using livestreaming platforms’ built-in schedulers, Sophie Fitzpatrick at EdgyLabs recommends, and by posting the URL to your social channels in the days before the big event.

Sneak previews can also help you grab attention and tap into that important fear of missing out that drives naturally curious humans to click on live video.

Case Studies: Brands Using Live Video to Impress Us With Content Marketing

Several early adopter brands are standouts in the live video marketing world — and many who have just embraced the technology are starting to shine, as well.

In February 2016, Dunkin’ Donuts put itself at the front of the live video marketing trend by giving a live tour of its facilities via Facebook Live. The tour included a peek into the brand’s test kitchen and interviews with its staff experts, who provided insider information about some of the brand’s most popular treats and drinks. The video even included a visit to the company’s donut factory. And by leaving the video on its Facebook page after the event ended, Dunkin’ Donuts continues to accumulate views and visitors, turning a live event into a powerful piece of content years later.

While live sports will always make for good live video content, the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) is using livestreaming as a brand-building tool, not merely a distribution channel, according to Aaron Agius. UFC’s Fightpass, which Agius describes as “a Netflix for fight fans,” gives fans access not only to livestreamed events, but also to live video of press conferences, live interviews with fighters and other participants, and even coverage of combat sports from other organizations.

Live video makes it easier to cross or combine genres for greater creativity, as well. Irene Enriquez Chan at belive.tv describes one of that platform’s users who has discovered the value of live video streaming to showcase her work. “She calls [her videos] the ‘live image reveal,’” Chan tells us. “Due to her interactive live shows, she’s able to establish herself as an expert and she gets more inquiries about her photography services.”

To succeed at live video content marketing, keep it loose, keep it honest and know how you’ll measure the video’s success when you go in. Then, create!

Images by: Courtney Clayton, Tim Mossholder, Jakob Owens

Successful CTAs: How to Attract Better Prospects and Create a Better User Experience

July 17, 2018/0 Comments/in Tips /by Epic Presence Team

The call to action. It’s your bottom line. The reason you brought eyeballs to your page. The only thing you really want visitors to do.

So why are so many CTAs just plain bad?

Seventy percent of B2B blog posts and Web pages contained no call to action at all five years ago, according to Anita Campbell at Small Business Trends. That number has decreased somewhat over time, but for many businesses an increase in quantity doesn’t mean an increase in quality.

Here, we’re going to break down the biggest reasons CTAs fail, the best ways to avoid these mistakes and what tools you can use to create calls to action that attract better prospects.

Ugh: The Top Reasons CTAs Fail

“Getting prospective customers to do what you want them to do can be like herding cats,” Dan Shewan writes at WordStream. “They abandon shopping carts before checking out, they don’t sign up for your beautifully written newsletter, and they don’t even have the common courtesy to read your blog posts all the way to the end [editor’s note: ahem].”

A good call to action, however, can give that herd of cats some direction. It can focus the attentions of your visitors and give them clear next steps.

But bad CTAs do the opposite: They drive people away.

Here’s how too many of them do it:

1. They’re Too Vague

“Buy now,” “Submit” and “Click here” are three of the most popular calls to action online today — partly because they’re also the default language in a number of website-building tools.

They’re also deadly vague. Buy what now? Submit to whom and for what purpose? Click here for what?

In a world of increasing privacy and security concerns, where nearly every Internet user has been burned by a virus at least once, this kind of vagueness doesn’t cause excitement. It causes wariness — not only of the CTA itself, but of your brand as a whole.

2. They Don’t Call Users to Action

One thing the vague “Click here” and “Buy now” CTAs have going for them: They start with a strong, specific action verb. “Click” and “buy” are concrete actions. They’re something readers can do.

Unfortunately, many calls to action are, technically speaking, not a call to action at all. They may provide information, but they don’t ask the reader to do anything, Billy McCaffrey writes at WordStream.

For instance, while “our latest white paper is available here” is great information, it doesn’t tell users what to do with that information. Users who know how to download your white papers or who have done so before may motivate themselves to download this one, but first-time readers may not want to figure out the process.

Worse, they may not feel as if the white paper is for them — that they have been specifically invited to download it for their own use.

3. They’re Unreadable

A call to action won’t be followed if it isn’t read. And when users typically spend mere seconds on a web page, the quicker they spot the call to action the more likely they are to follow it.

Yet many calls to action are so poorly designed, it’s almost as if the business doesn’t really want people to find them. Placing your CTA out of sequence with the decision-making process, crowding it out with other elements or using a color scheme that blends in with other page elements are three of the top mistakes that cause a call to action to disappear into the ether, according to Aaron Agius at Entrepreneur.

4. They’re in the Wrong Context

CTAs are expected in certain media, like marketing emails and social media ads. In others, however, they end up cheapening your content and actually driving customers away, Jonathan Greene writes at Medium, where he argues CTAs don’t belong.

“If you think your greatest value from writing on Medium comes from profit, you are wrong,” Greene says. “The greatest value of your action on Medium is inspiring others.” Slapping a call to action on that inspiration implies that you’re not there to help or uplift, but that you want something in return.

“No piece of content will ever be more artistically successful with a call to action at the end of it,” Green noted.

Lessons From Failure: How to Make Bad CTAs Better

If it does nothing else, a call to action should call readers to act. The action called for should be strong, be specific and engage the use of the body in some way, even if it’s only to click a button or link.

Why?

According to Leo Widrich at Buffer, action words trigger the brain’s motor cortex. When the brain encounters strong action verbs, it experiences itself not only reading a word, but actually following through on the action.

And the stronger the verb, the stronger the sensation of action. “Read” and “learn,” as primarily mind-based activities, produce a relatively weak motor cortex response. “Stand,” “search” and even “click,” as movement-based activities, produce a much stronger one.

A strong, commanding action verb makes readers’ brains experience the action you call for even before they do it, which greatly increases the chances they’ll take the next step.

Beyond the copy, here are four things you can start doing today to improve your CTAs, boost click-through rates and ultimately drive more conversions.

1. Marry Content With Design

Rounded conversion buttons set off with white space and in contrasting colors from the remainder of the page also get more attention than their more square, crowded or drab counterparts, says Agius. In addition, high-quality images that support the goal of your call to action can help. Just make sure these images don’t compete with the CTA itself.

According to Steve Young at Unbounce, testimonials and case studies near a CTA can increase conversion rates by 68.7 percent — but only if they’re the right kind of testimonials and case studies. Look for short, snappy copy that’s “both believable and impressive,” says Agius.

2. Think Long(er) Term

When you’re generating or contributing content to a platform like Medium, Greene recommends limiting your CTAs to links to other Medium pieces you’ve done, to your main website or to an email list.

From the website or email list, you can start drawing in potential customers.

To some, this sounds counterintuitive: How do more steps lead to more conversion? Here, it’s because you’re building on the reader’s existing interest, inspiration or investment. The original article creates that sense of emotional and intellectual connectedness. The journey to your website or email list continues it.

3. Personalize Your Content

In early 2018, HubSpot’s Jeffrey Vocell ran a study that looked at more than 300,000 CTAs. The CTAs he considered fell into one of three buckets:

Basic CTAs
Multivariate CTAs that were being split-tested)
Smart CTAs that responded dynamically to viewer locations, browser languages and many other user variables

What he found wasn’t surprising: The smart CTAs convert much better than the others. Dynamic CTAs that can speak to someone’s unique profile convert at about twice the rate of other CTAs.

Why such a profound uptick in conversions? Because smart CTAs let you serve someone “serving them content that reflects their current level of interest and knowledge on the subject,” Vocell writes.

“Blog posts and web pages might cater to multiple audiences at the same time, but if they all have the same CTA on them regardless of who’s reading, you’re neglecting various portions of your audience — those people who are either too advanced for what you’re offering, or aren’t advanced enough to need it yet. Smart CTAs accommodate for these differences across the buyer’s journey.”

If you’re interested in trying out dynamic, smart CTAs, here are a few marketing automation tools you should know:

HubSpot is one of the go-to platforms for personalized marketing. If you have the budget, it has several features that will let you personalize calls to actions on your landing pages, on your blog posts, in your emails and on other digital assets.
SharpSpring and Experiture have some excellent dynamic CTA capabilities, as well.

4. Test Your CTAs

As you can imagine, there are scores of variables that go into someone’s decision to click “Buy Now” or “Learn More” buttons. That’s why split-testing your CTAs is so important.

“There is indeed a magic formula for creating CTAs that convert,” Robin Nichols writes at AB Tasty. “Test, test and test again. In the real world, behind every successful campaign, every effective call-to-action, are dozens or even hundreds of A/B test runs.”

In general, the variables worth testing break into five categories, Elana Chiari writes at MailUp. Those include:

Color. Think back to what Agius recommended about button design. Does it make sense to change a red button to a green one? Test that hypothesis.
Size. “The button should be large enough to be noticeable, but an excessive size may be too aggressive and detrimental to the user experience,” Chiari writes. Run a test to find out where that “too aggressive line is.”
Position. On landing pages, it’s usually a good idea to have your CTA above the fold. In a blog post, it might make sense to have a newsletter signup at the end of the post, or perhaps someone in the middle of the copy. Test those possibilities to find out what works best
Copy. In Agius’ piece, he points to a study that found changing a CTA from “Get Your Membership” to the more specific “Find Your Gym and Get Membership” resulted in 213 percent more clicks.
Design. Do rounded buttons really outperform square ones? Don’t trust someone’s recommendations. Run that test yourself.

Two of the best tools for getting started with A/B testing are Optimizely and VWO.

How to Say What You Mean in a CTA

Your CTA should call readers to a specific action. But how exactly do you call for the right action at each point of the sales funnel? “Any CTA is better than no CTA,” says Neil Patel, “but it helps if you have a strategy that propels leads deeper into, not out of, your sales funnel.”

Every SaaS company wants to captivate (and convert) potential customers, but the way to do so isn’t always intuitive, especially at the top of the sales funnel.

Let’s take a look at some of the most common CTAs seen throughout the funnel and how well they do their job.

‘Follow Us on Social!’

This CTA is one of the most popular ways to draw potential customers closer. It appeals to the 50 percent of qualified leads who aren’t ready to make a purchase decision while encouraging them to stay in touch via social media.

Here, the CTA starts with a strong action verb, “follow.” It includes some specifics (follow us). It even tells the visitor where they’ll be doing the following … sort of.

Where does this link lead? Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, another page listing all those options? To boost the rate at which visitors click this CTA, make sure they know exactly which social media platform they’re getting when they do. Something like “Follow Us on Twitter!” would do the job.

Or punch it up even further. Serial entrepreneur Jeremy Smith recommends using a call to action that implies the person clicking is becoming part of a story that only gets better. Here, that option might read “Join Us on Facebook!” or “Continue the Journey on Twitter!”

‘Download Our [Lead Magnet]’

Ebooks, white papers, worksheets, info packets: The list of potential lead magnets is endless, but these tools are only valuable to you or to prospective contacts if they’re actually downloaded.

“Download Our Ebook” asks for a bit more involvement from the visitor than a social media like or follow. Here, you’re asking them to commit sufficient interest to want that ebook, white paper or other free prize in your digital box of cereal.

So, how do you convert “I’ll click Like on Facebook” visitors to “I’ll read this free ebook” visitors?

Lilach Bullock recommends involving your visitors in the CTA directly by letting them “speak” through a CTA in the first person. “Download Our Ebook” invites them to take a step, but “Send Me My Free Ebook Today” puts them in the position of asking to participate in that step. And because asking signals buy-in, it also encourages buy-in.

‘Free Trial’

As a CTA, this one…isn’t. There’s no verb at all, much less an actionable verb. Sure, visitors love adjectives like “free” and nouns like “trial,” both of which offer them the chance to make their own decisions about value without requiring a commitment. But what do you want your visitor to do?

Despite its weaknesses, “Free Trial” is still one of the most popular CTAs out there. To improve its conversion power, focus on clarifying exactly what your visitor gets when they click it, Patel recommends.

For instance, try “Free Trial Version,” “Instant Download – Free Trial Version,” or “Try Our Free Trial.” For that first-person experience, experiment with “Yes, I want my free trial!” or “I want to try [Software] for free.”

‘Free 30 Days’

“Free 30 Days” suffers from many of the same defects as “Free Trial,” but it has one difficulty all its own: It threatens to deposit the user at a credit card information form they aren’t prepared to fill out, either because they don’t have their card handy or because they don’t want to share that much information.

The result? Often, a quick click of the back button and a moment of revulsion.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

In December 2017, Amazon introduced its app users to a swipe-based 1-Click checkout, as Sarah Perez at TechCrunch reports. The swipe bar contained the CTA “Swipe to buy with 1-Click.”

The results? Approval, not only for the swipe function itself but also for the CTA. Amazon shoppers knew exactly what would happen if they swiped.

Use that same level of specificity if you want users to land on a payment page in the right moment.

‘Buy Now’

“Buy Now” can learn something from Amazon’s 1-Click swipe bar as well.

Here, the value is in being placed alongside a less commitment-heavy CTA, e.g. “Start your free trial.” Part of what made Amazon’s 1-Click so popular, notes Perez, is that users not only knew what they were getting by swiping, but they could also discern how it differed from clicking “Add to Cart.”

Users in a hurry could 1-click, while those who intended to buy but wanted to browse still had the cart option. Win-win.

If You Forget Everything Else, Remember This

To turn your call to action into customer action:

Use short, strong, concrete action verbs.
Design for visibility and appeal.
Place your call to action with the user’s decision-making process.

And let your own taste be your guide. If you’re intrigued and excited by your CTA’s design, placement and wording, your audience likely will be, too.

But then test your design against alternatives, anyway.

Images by: Miguel Bruna, Clem Onojeghuo, Mikael Kristenson

Customer Surveys: The Secret Ingredient in SaaS Content Marketing?

June 19, 2018/0 Comments/in Tips /by Epic Presence Team

We sometimes lose sight of how much data we as a species are currently producing. A little perspective: A 2017 IBM Marketing Cloud Survey estimated that 90 percent of all human data had been generated in the preceding 24 months.

Content marketing probably represents a significant portion of that data. Nearly every business with an online presence engages in some form of content creation or content marketing, and many have made content marketing a core part of their overall marketing strategy.

When your company isn’t seeing results from those efforts, though, it can feel like you’re just throwing content into an ever-growing pile.

It may be time for a better content strategy.

One option? Customer surveys.

Many SaaS companies eschew customer surveys because they feel like more work with little payoff. After all, you have customers’ behavior data. You know what they clicked, what they paid for and whether they came back. That’s plenty to work from, right?

Not so, says Colleen Jones at Content Marketing Institute. Behavioral data only tells you what people actually did. Iit doesn’t explain who those people are, what they think about your brand or services, or why they took the actions they did.

It also doesn’t tell you what they did before or after their contact with your content.

It doesn’t even tell you why they ended up on your website in the first place.

Customer surveys can, though. Here’s how to incorporate customer surveys (and their resulting data) into your SaaS content marketing strategy.

Go To the Source: How to Solicit Information (and From Whom)

“The purpose of content is to build the relationship between the business and the buyer,” notes an article at The Daily Egg. And it’s easier to build relationships when you know something about the person you’re seeking to connect with.

SaaS companies in particular understand the value of relationship-building, since software as a service isn’t a one-time transaction. Done well, it builds longstanding partnerships.

Building relationships with the right decision makers is key. If your company offers software as a service aimed at accounting for mid-sized construction businesses, for instance, effective content marketing should reach the people who work for mid-sized construction businesses and who have some influence there over the accounting process.

While basic demographic information can give you a broad overview of your audience, it doesn’t always translate into actionable marketing insights, as Jebbit cofounder Jonathan Lacoste notes at Inc. For instance, while you may know that most of your social media followers are women ages 25 to 40, that data doesn’t tell you why those women like your brand or what they’re looking for.

Naturally, you could go to each of these visitors and ask them to dive into a survey. But to do that, you’ll need to know how best to reach them and how to present the survey in a way they’re most likely to respond to.

And if you knew that, half the survey questions would be moot.

What’s the answer? According to Katrina Pfannkuch at Kapost, it may be time to build buyer personas. Liz O’Neill Dennison offers three steps to understanding the people you want to reach and how to reach them:

Review and use visitor information you already have.
Ask established customers about their process.
Draw a map of the motivations, questions, needs and behaviors that potential customers are most likely to bring to your content.

Once you have these details in mind, it’s easier to spot places in which customer surveys about more specific topics — from the value of your content to their impressions of a particular interaction or service — will allow you to dig one level deeper into improving your content.

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You Can’t Know What You Don’t Ask: How to Choose the Right Questions

Once you know who you want to reach and where to get their attention, it’s time to decide what you want to ask. After all, you can’t get the right answers — those that will be most effective for your marketing goals — by asking the wrong questions.

Some of the most common right questions SaaS content marketing teams ask are:

What do people think of your content and your brand? In an article in the Harvard Business Review, Frank V. Cespedes and Russ Heddleston note that the average time users spend viewing content is 2 minutes, 27 seconds. Customers’ impressions of your content and brand develop in this time — and knowing what those impressions are can tell you how quickly you’re engaging potential buyers.
Why do people respond to a certain piece of content? Jones recounts a story of a client who saw 10 percent of its videos driving 90 percent of its traffic. Naturally, the client wanted to replicate the successful elements of that 10 percent — but they had no idea why those particular videos were so effective. Behavioral data showed what was happening, but not why.
How did the content change a person’s decisions or behavior? Cespedes and Heddleston found that, for B2B buyers, good case studies led to a higher purchase rate because buyers could see what other businesses achieved with the product or service. Surveys can help you determine exactly how content gets transformed into behavior, allowing you to focus on the content that drives the actions you want.

With your questions in mind, it’s time to design a survey.

First, don’t make it too long. IZEA emphasizes the interactive nature of customer surveys, and for good reason: According to Kevin McSpadden at Time, the average attention span for Internet users is eight seconds.

Eight seconds is tough when you’re trying to communicate core product, service or brand ideas. But it’s actually great for surveys.

Every time a new questions appears, the eight-second clock resets — as long as the questions are well-designed. And designing questions to fit both customers’ engagement needs and companies’ data needs is easier than many SaaS companies realize.

That said, it’s best to limit the questions you ask. And let customers know in advance how many you’ll be asking so they don’t quit in frustration before the end.

Once the survey is ready to go, place a clear call to action in an opportune place. For instance, if you want feedback on a particular video, place a link at the end of the video or in the video description. To ask questions about particular products or services, consider placing a call to action and link to the survey at the bottom of blog posts that focus on that product or service.

Have you created a survey but gotten no responses? Offering an incentive, like a small discount or freebie, can encourage greater participation. Get creative!

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Have Data, Will Market: How to Transform Survey Answers Into Intel

In addition to choosing which questions to ask, you’ll also need to consider how to ask them. “Surveying is a strong quantitative methodology when used correctly,” says Jones.

For instance, closed-ended questions about the past tend to generate more useful data. Many people enthusiastically state what they will do, but when the opportunity appears they don’t do what they said they would.

Instead, ask questions about what customers did. “Did you recommend our services?” will gather more useful information about word of mouth than “Would you recommend our services?”

Many seemingly open-ended questions can be turned into closed-ended questions in a survey. For example, instead of asking “What do you think about our service?” and providing a text box for typed responses, consider asking “Which of the following statements best describes your impression of our service?” and providing three to five answer options.

Don’t shy away from online survey creation tools. Tools like SurveyMonkey allow you to create several different types of questions for free, with the option to upgrade to a paid account if you want access to a fuller range of tools.

The Bottom Line

According to a study by CoBloom, 11 percent of the world’s largest SaaS companies in 2017 didn’t even have a blog, while 60 percent of the top-performing companies blogged about educational or news topics. Thirty-six percent of SaaS blogs had no clear call to action.

Content marketing is a wide-open field for SaaS providers. But, as with any form of marketing, content works best when it’s tailored to the people you want and need to build relationships with. Well-designed surveys provide an opportunity to build those connections.

Category: Tips